1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to health care/medical information software. More specifically, the field of the invention is that of health care/medical information software for patient information in health care systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Much time and many resources are spent by health care institutions and medical service practitioners, such organizations being referred to herein as “providers,” collecting and re-collecting medical information from patients. Because providers have different requirements and workflow procedures based on specialty, specialized forms are in use in separate offices. Patients are forced to answer common administrative, financial, and health related questions repeatedly, typically in the format of a predefined paper form with spaces for hand written responses, as they move from provider to provider over the course of care.
Standardization of paper based forms for collecting health information have proven to be useful within an organization, but providers across a community tend to have difficulty coming to a consensus for standardization. The lack of consensus stems from differences in types and resolution of health information specialists collect, in particular health care institutions such as insurance companies and hospitals may have differing types of relevant information, as do hospitals, testing labs, and physicians. Also, the workflow within those organizations dictates the need for specialized forms and therefore requires those organizations to manually transfer information from standard forms to their custom forms.
The reason there has not been a wide spread adoption of uniform health care patient forms is that standardized forms fail to satisfy the diverse needs across the health care and medical community and there is no standard for collecting electronic health information and distributing it to every participant that require such information. Even those providers which have electronic systems have different vendors that are expecting the data in different formats, thus making it difficult to share patient information electronically. Attempts to allow patients enter their information into electronic systems using web-based questionnaires have had some success for individual organizations, but from the patient perspective this algorithm is just marginally better than the paper based process, making the patient have to fill out all the information repeatedly on different websites instead of on different clipboards.
A patient based medical/health care information system must be an elective process initiated by the patient and must insure compliance with HIPAA and other privacy legislation and concerns.